A gaudy NTSC 'look'

For those of you familar with UK Television, there was a comedy show called The Day Today which contained some sketches from a supposed U.S news team covering fictional stories. They had a great look for these sketches which i'm trying to emulate - it was basically a really dirty NTSC image which had loads of fringing and skewed colours. Aside from using an NTSC camera with a rubbish lens, does anyone have any ideas about how best to achieve this look?

I'm imagining there might be a fair amount of grading involved but if anyone is familiar with this look and can offer any thoughts on how to achieve it authentically i'd be hugely grateful.

For those of you familar with UK Television, there was a comedy show called The Day Today which contained some sketches from a supposed U.S news team covering fictional stories. They had a great look for these sketches which i'm trying to emulate - it was basically a really dirty NTSC image which had loads of fringing and skewed colours. Aside from using an NTSC camera with a rubbish lens, does anyone have any ideas about how best to achieve this look?

I'm imagining there might be a fair amount of grading involved but if anyone is familiar with this look and can offer any thoughts on how to achieve it authentically i'd be hugely grateful.

Thanks,

Ryan

I wonder how well the joke would travel. NTSC doesn't look awful on NTSC sets. It's just the transfer that used to be bad.

I wonder how well the joke would travel. NTSC doesn't look awful on NTSC sets. It's just the transfer that used to be bad.

Yes it does. The original version of NTSC especially. It was the Yanks who invented the term Never The Same Color! Hi Ryan, why not rent an NTSC camera, shoot some charts and test and try and emulate the whole thing with your HD source material? Or just shoot NTSC and blow it up to HD, which would really make for an awful image!

Yeah, dubbed VHS has that garish, contrasty look. Depending on the monitor, it would be the orange, magenta and red hues being cranked way up. Blues and greens also tended to be slightly to moderately over as well in some monitors. So re-photographing with a cheap lens at lower resolutions and cranking up the gamma might just do it nicely. But how far can you go before you have gone to far? Plenty of testing would be most recommended.

Hi Ryan,
I just remembered a story from a commercial a couple of years ago here. Iwasn't on the show but was told the story by a crew member. To match newly shot footage to old spcae footage they had, I believe it was video (probably transferred from 16mm?) from the late Apollo missions or something 80s they recorded it out on Digibeta and dubbed it to VHS and redubbed it 6 times and then took the footage back into their NLE!

Final Cut has a little used video filter that muddies up the image called bad TV under effects > stylize > bad TV. Not sure if that's what you are going for, but give it a shot if you have access.

Hi Ryan, I just remembered a story from a commercial a couple of years ago here. Iwasn't on the show but was told the story by a crew member. To match newly shot footage to old spcae footage they had, I believe it was video (probably transferred from 16mm?) from the late Apollo missions or something 80s they recorded it out on Digibeta and dubbed it to VHS and redubbed it 6 times and then took the footage back into their NLE!